Around The Tea-Table eBook

CHAPTER LXV.

Underthecamel’ssaddle.

Rachel had been affianced to Jacob, and one day while
her father, Laban, was away from home she eloped with
Jacob. Laban returned home and expressed great
sorrow that he had not been there when his daughter
went away, saying that he would have allowed her to
go, and that she might have been accompanied with
a harp and the dance and with many beautiful presents.

Laban started for Rachel and Jacob. He was very
anxious to recover the gods that had been stolen from
his household. He supposed that Rachel had taken
them, as she really had. He came up in the course
of a few days to the party and demanded the gods that
had been taken from his house. Jacob knew nothing
about the felony, but Rachel was secreting these household
gods.

Laban came into the tent where she was, and asked
for them. She sat upon a saddle of a camel, the
saddle having been laid down at the side of the tent,
and under this camel’s saddle were the images.
Rachel pretended to be sick, and said she could not
rise. Her father, Laban, supposed that she told
the truth, and looked everywhere but under the camel’s
saddle, where really the lost images were. He
failed in the search, and went back home without them.

It was a strange thing for Laban to do. He pretended
to be a worshiper of the true God. What did he
want of those images? Ah, the fact was, that
though he worshiped God, he worshiped with only half
a heart, and he sometimes, I suppose, repented of
the fact that he worshiped him at all, and really
had a hankering after those old gods which in his earliest
days he had worshiped. And now we find him in
Rachel’s tent looking for them.

Do not let us, however, be too severely critical of
Laban. He is only the representative of thousands
of Christian men and women, who, once having espoused
the worship of God, go back to their idols. When
a man professes faith in Christ on communion-day,
with the sacramental cup in his hand, he swears allegiance
to the Lord God Almighty, and says, “Let all
my idols perish!” but how many of us have forsaken
our fealty to God, and have gone back to our old idols!

There are many who sacrifice their soul’s interests
in the idolatry of wealth. There was a time when
you saw the folly of trying with, money to satisfy
the longing of your soul. You said, when you saw
men going down into the dust and tussle of life, “Whatever
god I worship, it won’t be a golden calf.”
You saw men plunge into the life of a spendthrift,
or go down into the life of a miser, like one of old
smothered to death in his own money-chest, and you
thought, “I shall be very careful never to be
caught in these traps in which so many men have fallen,
to their souls’ eternal discomfiture.”

But you went down into the world; you felt-the force
of temptation; you saw men all around you making money
very fast, some of them sacrificing all their Christian
principle; you felt the fascination come upon your
own soul, and before you knew it, you were with Laban
going down to hunt in Rachel’s tent for your
lost idols.